Field diary and observation in contemporary language research

Observing the world around us is a social practice that most humans perform when they are young. Novel writers and songwriters constantly mention how crucial it is for them to be observers in order to find inspiration to write. Such an analogy helps us understand how decisive field diaries and observations might be in qualitative research once they demand attention, focus, and the liberty to think outside the box. In light of that, this paper discusses the potential of providing opportunities for displaying and analyzing data from field diaries and observations in a research report. Such a movement could prevent scholars from approaching those elements only as scaffolding for interviews. We have also attempted to illustrate how the idea of writing field diaries has been revisited in the face of the contemporary technological affordances which have increasingly provided us with multimodal resources. This qualitative research was implemented through the Teacher-Research framework (Freeman, 1998; Author et al., 2023). As a result, issues with displaying observing data in a written report, dealing with ethical relations, and connecting observation with research instruments emerged during the discussion proposed herein.